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Tag Archives: Jimmy Carter

At the age of 95, Jimmy Carter is now the longest-living U.S. president in history. “Great men are a dime a dozen,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough noted on the former president’s birthday. “Jimmy Carter has always been something far greater than that. He has lived his life as a good man. And that is exactly what America needs right now.”

Now, I realize the Trump-obsessed Scarborough is attempting to juxtapose the former president with the present one. But the canonization of Carter has always been transparent revisionism. Habitat for Humanity or not, the world would have been a far better place had Carter retired from the world stage after his presidency. Carter’s post-presidency is a stark reminder, in fact, that “good” personal decorum doesn’t necessarily translate into “good” political actions.

“Great men” do not, as Carter has his entire post-presidential life, use freelance diplomacy abroad to undermine elected American governments. They do not coddle and legitimize tyrants and murderers around the world. They do not undercut liberalism by allowing despots to use them as props. It is one thing to meet with detestable characters as president — diplomacy and American interests often dictate it — but it is quite another to ally yourself with them as a free man. Yet, that’s what Carter has done for 40 years.

Carter was the first, and only, ex-president to visit communist Cuba. “I look forward to this opportunity to meet with Cuban people from all walks of life and to talk with President Castro,” Carter claimed. While there, Carter would spin fantasies about Cuba’s “superb systems of health care and universal education,” while offering perfunctory attention to the hundreds of political prisoners who were, as he tossed around a baseball with Castro, being imprisoned and tortured.

Then again, there are few communist strongmen who haven’t sung Carter’s praises. Before the socialist cratering of Venezuela, Carter had been one of Hugo Chavez’s most important international allies. In a speech at the Carter Center, three weeks before Venezuelans voted in 2012, the former president noted that “of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” (You won’t be surprised, I suspect, to learn that the United States was “one of the worst” because it allowed all citizens to spend money on campaigns.)

Numerous international pro-democracy groups disagreed with Carter’s assessment. In Venezuela, Chavez was the only one with access to unlimited funds — not to mention the state’s infrastructure and media — while anyone who opposed him was cowed into silence lest they lose their property and be deported. Carter, like many others these days, forgets there’s a lot more to liberalism than voting.

It must have been a tragic blow to the opposition to have watched a former American president, one endlessly celebrated by liberals in his own country, preemptively endorsing the authority of Chavismo. After a 45-minute chat with Carter, Chavez, just “as Fidel says,” called the former president “a man of honor.”

He wasn’t alone. Nicaragua communist Daniel Ortega, an ally since Carter helped him establish a Sandinista dictatorship in 1979, surely agreed. As did Haitian military martinet Raoul Cedras. As did strongman Joaquin Balaguer, who won another term in the Dominican Republic in 1990 after Carter ignored widespread fraud.

It was Carter, who takes far too much credit for the Camp David Accords, who “monitored” the 2006 Palestinian elections in which Hamas toppled the ruling Fatah in Gaza. Not only did Carter legitimize Hamas’ theocrat rule, he argued the only way toward a genuine peace was recognition of the terror group by the international community.

The Great Man has always had a soft spot for the murders of Israeli citizens. As Douglas Brinkley described it, Carter’s “fondness” for the godfather of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat, “transcended politics, based on their emotional connection and the shared belief that they were both ordained to be peacemakers by God.”

Yet, not even after Hamas had begun tossing Arafat’s Fatah officials off rooftops and summarily executing them in the streets did Carter change his mind. Even today, as Hamas targets civilians and murders American citizens, Morning Joe’s hero argues that the group deserves “legitimacy as a political actor” because it is “committed” to peace.

The most consequential of Carter’s meddling, though, was his “brokering” of a disastrous deal with North Korea in 1994. Carter actively undercut the Clinton administration’s international efforts to stop the dictatorship from attaining nuclear weapons. The former president, who was not empowered to make any agreements, struck one with Kim Il Sung, and then publicly released it to pressure the administration. Carter would admit as much, explaining, “I hoped that it would consummate a resolution of what I considered to be a very serious crisis.”

Talk about Logan Act violation. One Clinton aide called Carter’s actions “near traitorous.” The mess you see now is, in part, the result of Carter’s handiwork.

So, at worst, Carter is a knowing supporter of bad actors, and at best, a naïve moral relativist. Bruce Klingner argues that the former president “habitually adopts a value-neutral, even-handed treatment of all countries, ignoring the reality that some are belligerents and others are victims.” This seems charitable framing for a man who was once the leader of the world’s most powerful nation. Whatever the case, no modern ex-president has been more destructive to the interests of liberalism.

Jimmy Carter began the first Iranian hostage crisis and Reagan ended it. Obama began America’s second Iranian hostage crisis.

President Trump just ended it.

On January 12, 2016, Iran’s IRGC terror force seized 2 US Navy vessels, extracted classified information from their crews at gunpoint, broadcast images of American sailors on their knees and forced an officer to read an apology. A day later, the Islamic terror state released its American hostages.

Three days later, Implementation Day lifted sanctions on Iran. By next month, Iran was claiming that it had received over $100 billion in sanctions relief.

It was not the last ransom payment linked to the nuclear deal.

On January 17, Obama illegally airlifted $400 million in foreign currency on unmarked cargo planes to the IRGC as a down payment on a $1.7 billion ransom for four American hostages being held in Iran.

Since then, Iran has taken more American hostages.

President Trump made it clear that there will be no more dirty deals and payoffs. “America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail.”

The hostage he set free was American foreign policy. Obama didn’t ship $1.7 billion to Iran because he cared about the four American prisoners or the Navy sailors. They were just icing on the yellowcake. Iran wasn’t able to dictate to the White House because it was holding American prisoners as hostages, but because it had imprisoned Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and was holding his beloved legacy hostage.

Obama allowed Iran to take over Syria, Iraq and Yemen to protect the nuke scam. He let the terrorists of the IRGC, which he had protected from sanctions in the Senate, humiliate our sailors while one of his minions, John Kirby, currently working as a CNN analyst where he’s doing his part in the echo chamber to defend the deal, claimed that our Naval personnel weren’t protected by the Geneva Convention.

(And that’s from an administration which believed that the Geneva Convention protects terrorists.)

I don’t know what Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is going to say to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Obama and the sleaze media will try to make this story all about Bibi and phony “violations of protocol.”

sassygranny.blogspot.com

Bibi will try to tell the truth.

Who will you listen to? This is a once-in-a-lifetime event. This time it really matters. Life or death, war or peace, lies or the truth.

This time it’s literally life or death -– not just for one person, but for entire nations and ethnic peoples.If you doubt that, just see what ISIS is doing to the indigenous Christians who lived in the Middle East centuries before Islam.

But don’t think we are the only ones that feel this way. The truth is, a majority of Americans have seen Obama for the untrustworthy person that he is over the past six years.

Of course, anybody can simply say that they don’t trust Obama, but without any context or comparison, it is difficult to surmise just how untrustworthy our president really is in the eyes of most Americans.

What follows, then, is a list of just some of the things that the American people trust and put their faith in more than Obama.

Hopefully, this will put it in a little perspective.

“12 Things I trust more than Barack Obama”

Mexican tap water

A porcupine with a “pet me” sign

Bill Clinton

A fart while fighting the flu

An elevator ride with Ray Rice

Taking pills or a drink offered by Bill Cosby

A Bigfoot sighting

A Hillary Clinton war story reported by Brian Williams

Gas station sushi

Jimmy Carter

A Palestinian on a motorcycle

Pete Carroll coaching decisions

Sadly, all of these things and people inspire more trust and faith than the elected leader of our country (H/T Young Conservatives).

These are sad days for America, when other failed presidents look absolutely brilliant in comparison to our current one, and when people would rather hang out with rapists and abusers, or risk serious illness, injury or death, than believe the president of the United States of America.

DETROIT, Mich. (INTELLIHUB.COM) — The former 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, appeared at a recent annual conference held by the Islamic Society of North America recently as thousands of onlookers listened to what he had to say.

Photo via Before it’s News

While Carter, an authority figure, spoke on a number if issues, he maintained that the key to securing peace in the mid-East stems from the “principles of Allah”, as reported by others.

Onlookers were amazed by Carter’s “insight” when he requested for Muslim leaders at the convention to sign a “Declaration for Peaceful Communities” to end “suffering”.

According to Channel 7 Action News Detroit, “Carter and his wife have traveled to 145 countries”, building a “coalition”.

You can’t blame George Bush for this one, so instead they blamed Romney and an obscure film. But it is also now a common agreement, by all but the Kool-Aid bunch, that the 15-minute video about Muhammad that was originally blamed for the attacks in Egypt and Libya had nothing to do with them, especially the one in Libya… It was a pre-planned precision attack on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 to send a message.